Review: Glass Onion
By MAX MANTEL ’25
The murder mystery formula is one of the most enduring and successful because of how repeatable it is; from more than 50 stories of Agatha Christie to the countless adaptations of Holmes, to the pop culture takeover of true crime stories in recent years, the psychology behind why one person kills another is fascinating to almost everyone. A peculiar flavor of mystery, the whodunit, has gone overlooked since Christie, or at least it was, until the wildly successful 2019 film Knives Out, which succeeded because of its convincing cast, consistent aesthetic, and, most of all, compelling mystery.
Director-writer Rian Johnson continues his new Christie-inspired series of whodunits with Glass Onion, the “sequel” to Knives Out (I say sequel because the movies themselves have nearly no relation). Immediately, Glass Onion feels flashier and more over-the-top than Knives Out was — with switches from a New England household to a private island in Greece, a rotten and torn-up family to a group of “influencers,” politicians, and businessmen, and even the colors switching from soft browns and forest greens to tropical blues, yellows, and one really cool rainbow dress. This change carries over with the cast, an intense group of people. “Disruptors” is the name they call themselves, unified by their shared interest in redefining boundaries and crossing the line. This classification is undermined almost immediately with the disruption mentioned, including blatant racist statements, the use of sweatshops, and the creation of dangerous business products. These disruptors are led by billionaire Miles Bron, an amalgamation of every tech CEO in the prwesent day who both angers and fascinates us.
The cast is the core of the mystery and they play off each other incredibly well. There’s just something that’s so fun about watching horrible people have the rug ripped out from underneath them so thoroughly. Doing the rug-ripping is Benoit Blanc, who is the only returning character, and is the detective tasked with solving the mystery. Blanc works as both the straight man to the absurdity of the Disruptors, as well as the plot device of the detective to move along the story and solve the mystery.
The mystery in question is simply a fun and well-made puzzle. It is crazy just how much the movie is able to hide in front of your eyes; the camera tricks and cinematography used to support the hiding of information are incredible. The audience is basically told the entire story in different chunks, yet most will go by without a clue as to what happened due to how clever the movie is with its telling. The eventual solution makes sense psychologically, logically, and is just so fun to watch, like Knives Out, and it takes advantage of editing to deliver its story beats.
That being said, Glass Onion has a point to its story as well. Knives Out was largely about generational wealth and how families and communities can be corrupted by it. Glass Onion is also about money, yet its focus is on new money with old friends and how people will leave each other behind, and go as far as to kill in order to preserve the money that they feel entitled to. This message is conveyed much more directly, even stated out loud multiple times, but works, quite frankly, because of how many real-life parallels can be drawn to the characters and situations they find themselves in.
Glass Onion is also just straight-up hilarious; Knives Out’s humor came from snide remarks and witty snaps, but Glass Onion is more occupied with just being funny. Watching the characters bounce off each other is just so entertaining and the movie is gleeful in its comedy. Glass Onion is a louder, brasher, and funner counterpart to its predecessor, and I would recommend a watch (with friends!) wholeheartedly.
